


Lepidoptery

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Blood, Butterfly collection, Gen, Hogswatch, Tooth Fairies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:48:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28306293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: Downey never bothered to find out exactly how Jonathan Teatime had met his end, but if he had thought about it more carefully he might have arrived at some idea of the plan he had come up with.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 9





	Lepidoptery

Downey never bothered to find out exactly how Jonathan Teatime had met his end, but if he had thought about it more carefully he might have arrived at some idea of the plan he had come up with.

The night of his thirteenth Hogswatch, Liam Downey had sat behind the candle burning in the window of his parents house in Sto Kerrig with snow in his mouth to stop the bleeding from losing his last molar. He was too old to get presents from the Hogfather and if it was true—he suspected it wasn’t remotely—that the morality of children played into what they recieved, he ought to have been receiving nothing but fossilized peat for several years by that point. He felt almost betrayed by himself to be in the position of having a milk tooth under his pillow and knowing with adolescent certainty that he was not a good person, that he received pleasure from hurting other people and creatures.

There had been a girl he had known before he went away to Ankh-Morpork. She lived on a farm at the edge of town and he had seen she had a hair clip that looked like a blue butterfly and he’d suggested, to his own shock, because it was an irredeemably swottish way of beginning a conversation, several species that it might be. When it became clear how he knew this and that he had a board of dead insects that he had killed with potassium cyanide because it was faster and took more skill than other poisons, and was looking to add to it, and that he was proud of the delicate touch it took to handle and mount the specimens, he had actually relished the look of horror on her face and the way she sifted through adjectives ranging from “disgusting” to “evil.”

But there in the dark, swallowing blood and water, the air thick with the smell of the spruce tree—also dying, also killed for pleasure—he thought of the words of an entomologist whose work he was reading. “Sometimes you have to kill them to save them.” That wasn’t what he was doing at all. He was treating the insects like pressed flowers.

There was still magic in the night. A glimmer of childhood left even if he was entitled to wear the black robes that meant he had crossed the river of no return. He wasn’t wearing them then. He wore red flannel pajamas that had been bought a year earlier and were too small.

Downey left the candle and went to bed to wait for the Tooth Fairy and the Hogfather to cross paths in the airspace near the house. He’d found a peacock butterfly in the rafters a day earlier and one way or another he was going to get a set of black enamel number four pins to finish the job.

Sleigh bells and snuffling hogs and whatever sound Tooth Fairies were supposed to make—excitable chattering perhaps?—were what he expected to hear, and so they were what he heard.

Decades later the sun came up. There was blood on the snow. Blood was compulsory.


End file.
